I have visited this
major blot upon the US escutcheon a number of times over the past five years
(1-3). (Why there are so many blots one could visit and re-visit is a topic for
another time.) One would have thought that it was dead and buried, along with
the Cheney-Bush regime. In 2005 Bush himself had actually said that
torture would not be included in the US armamentarium for dealing with enemies,
perceived and real, (not a policy endorsed by the arch torture-facilitator
Cheney), and President Obama had announced the renunciation as official US
government policy. But now we are forced to revisit the subject by the new
propaganda-shtick, Ooops, sorry, I mean movie, "Zero Dark Thirty." Also, Bigelow glorified the Iraq War in "The Hurt Locker." That allowed the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to shoulder aside "Avatar," one of the truly cinematographically-great movies of all time, which also happened to be anti-capitalist and pro-environmental preservation.

For what she has done in re-justifying the use of torture, some have even compared Kathryn Bigelow, apparently from the technical side a fine film-maker, to Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi-era photographer, who was indeed a fine photographer. Actually, I think comparing
the two is an insult to the memory of Riefenstahl, who died at the age of 101
in 2003. She may have glorified the infamous Nuremberg rallies and the Nazi
regime in general, but she never took any photos glorifying the Gestapo's
torture chambers.

Like Glen Greenwald
(4), I am not writing a movie review here (and indeed I have no intention of
seeing the movie). I am dealing with the self-proclaimed justification of
torture as an instrument of US "intelligence-gathering" policy (which
justification Bigelow is now scurrying around to deny. She was only presenting
the "facts." But whether they are indeed "facts" is part of the problem.
However, it is only part of the problem, as I will show later in this column.)
The movie has suddenly re-opened the debate on whether torture "works" for
intelligence gathering, and thus is "justified" as a part of US policy
(discarded or not). One would have thought that indeed the argument was settled
(despite its effectiveness for Jack Bauer in "24"). Among other journalists,
Massimo Calabresi summarized and disposed of the subject very well in two
articles in, of all places, Time (5, 6). No, it doesn't "work," and at
times can be counter-productive. And there is a still-secret Senate committee
report that summarized all of the evidence and arguments against its use very
well.

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But I think that
there is a larger picture that must be taken into account here, when
considering the use of torture by agents of the US government, whether US or of
other governments under contract to the US. For many months, back when Cheney
was glorifying "enhanced interrogation techniques" (oh those right-wing
wordsmiths, Goebbels would have been proud), the torture debate was focused to
a significant extent on the issue of whether it "works" or not for eliciting
useful intelligence from captured military operatives, quasi-military
operatives, suspected terrorists, or people caught in some "anti-terrorist"
dragnet who might well have nothing to do with the activity. To repeat, virtually
every expert on gaining useful intelligence from captured operatives "from the
other side," whatever their particular classification might be, said that it
didn't (5, 6). One must note that there were a handful of non-experts in
addition to Cheney who thought that torture does "work." Take for example the
prominent Christian-Rightist Gary Bauer. Bauer stood in favor of the use of
torture along with a number of other Christian Rightists for whom the fact that
Christ himself was tortured to death by the Romans (who used crucifixion to
punish their enemies over a period of centuries) seemed not to be of import.

Of course there was
never any reason to think that the torture techniques put together by Dick
Cheney and his staff and specifically approved for use by President Bush (so
Cheney has told us, quite publicly) would "work," in terms of gaining useful
intelligence. After all, the techniques specified for use, as we know in
(literally) painful detail from the post hoc memo written by "Judge"
Bybee, were, as almost everyone knows, drawn from a torture program used on
captured U.S. servicemen by the Chinese People's Liberation Army in North Korea
over 50 years ago. It is also well-known that these techniques were
specifically designed to elicit false confessions, not useful intelligence,
from the U.S. POWs. On that level, it was successful.

Now this is not to
say that torture is never useful. In fact it is very broadly useful, as an
instrument of repression. Brought to its highest level of use as part of
state policy by the Nazi Germans, the Franco and Pinochet regimes, among many
others, it is very good for: terrorizing one's own population to repress
dissent; extracting information from politically active civilian regime
opponents; carrying out extra-judicial punishment of regime opponents;
repressing potential opposition in militarily occupied territories; extracting
false confessions from non-military persons, as in the Stalinist show trials of
the late 1930s; helping to establish a record of lawlessness, of total disregard
for the rule of law, as long as the regime says things such as, "We are doing
what we are doing in order to keep our people safe and fight terror." For this
last one, we need look no further than our own doorstep, of course.

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As for whether what
the Georgite regime did in terms of torture was really "torture," Judge
(sick) Bybee and Professor (sick) Yoo attempted, in very legalistic language,
to define what they authorized as "not torture." This causes one to turn to the
Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture to see what they say
about it. Unfortunately, neither document defines "torture" in any sort of the
detail in which Judge (sick) Bybee did. The authors of the Geneva Conventions
just assumed that everyone "knows" what it is, and the UN Convention defines it
in general terms as "Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether
physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as
obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession . . ."

According to Judge
(sick) Bybee, techniques from waterboarding to repeated slamming against walls
(even flexible ones) don't come under that definition. Alberto Gonzales
(remember him? Yes, he was one of GW Bush's most memorable Attorney Generals)
did the same thing when, at the beginning of the controversy, he advised the
President that doing what they wanted to do was OK because the Geneva
Conventions were "quaint." However, if one doesn't think that what one is doing
is torture, why even mention the Geneva Conventions? But here comes the rub,
and here comes the central argument against the use of torture by US agents,
even if torture did "work" for, say, intelligence gathering.

It just so happens
that under article VI of the U.S. Constitution, as treaties signed and ratified
by the U.S. government both Conventions are part of "the supreme law of the
land and [further] the judges of every state shall be bound by them." There it
is: by the two treaties cited above, signed and ratified by the US government, the
use of torture is banned. And so the "yes it does work, no it doesn't" argument
is a VERY dangerous, very WRONG one to get into. Why? Because it plays right
into the hands of the pro-torture folks.

For suppose, just
suppose, that it did work in terms of intelligence gathering from
military operatives? Suppose it did work specifically in the ticking time bomb
scenario, a la "24"? Why then, according to that argument, torture by the U.S.
would be OK, no? Well, NO. The central issue is not whether torture
works for those purposes or not. The central issue is, as above, that the use
of torture is prohibited by the Constitution's Article VI. Indeed, Bush,
Cheney, Bybee, Yoo, Addington, and every other Georgite official who took part
in the authorization of the use of torture violated the Constitution in general
and their oath to uphold it in particular. That is the argument that our side
should be using over and over again, as we struggle mightily to re-establish
the Rule of Law and Constitutional government in our great nation. And that is
the argument we should be using to attack the pro-torture propaganda of "Zero
Dark Thirty."

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at StonyBrookMedicine (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 35 books. In addition to his position on OpEdNews as a "Trusted Author," he is a Senior Editor, (more...)